Abstract
Autore:
Testoni Binetti Saffo
Titolo:
"Gaetano Mosca e il suo ruolo nella storia delle dottrine politiche"
In 1924, Gaetano Mosca became the first official professor of the history of political doctrines and institutions at the University of Rome, by which time he was already a well-known political scientist and constitutionalist. Already, in Turin, where he had been appointed to the chair in constitutional law in 1896, he had laid important foundations for the future development of the study of the history of political thought, through the historical sensitivity of his research and teaching activities and through the special attention he paid to the political classics. It was no accident that Vittorio Beonio Brocchieri graduated under his supervision, writing a dissertation on the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Even then, history, for Mosca, was essential for the full understanding of political and legal phenomena.
In the years in which the history of political thought became recognised as one of the essential components of political studies, Gaetano Mosca went on to contribute to the specification of its methods, going beyond the Crocean theses that were prevalent and influential at the time: in his Storia delle dottrine politiche we find the fundamental principle of the mutual exchange between thought and institutions, a historiographical line, in which political thought was considered in relation to the institutional context from which it arose. This line also benefited from the rich and original contributions of Vittorio Beonio Brocchieri, who was particularly attentive to the understanding of political theories within the conflictuality of political reality, and Rodolfo De Mattei, who conceived of the study of political ideas as serving the end of reconstructing political culture.
While Gaetano Mosca did not found a real school of the history of political doctrines, then, he nevertheless left a precise mark, paving the way for the emergence within the discipline of line of study that was extraneous to philosophies of history and open to more concrete and practical conceptions of political reflection.
